Bass Interview #18 : Black Sun Empire

Looking forward to the Born To Rave on Saturday , Audiogenic made us be in touch with Black Sun Empire ! So busy in their agendas, the trio from Netherlands shared to us some of their time to give us an express interview !

1- Who are you ? How did you meet each other ?

We’re Micha, Milan and Rene and we’re in this band together called ‘Black Sun Empire’. Milan and Micha are brothers so they met at the breakfast table. Rene and Milan were in the same class in high school and had the same musical interest, so we all started hanging out, going to parties/concerts and being intrigued by the upcoming of electronic acts like Chemical Brothers, Front 242, The Orb, The Prodigy, Underworld etc, we bought our first synthesizers and sound cards and slowly started making music together.

2- Which artists most inspired you in your early days ? Those which inspires you today ?

We always liked all kinds of music, from Nirvana to Philip Glass and back to Prince, but if you narrow it down to the more electronic side of music : Front 242, The Orb, Chemical Brothers, Tricky, The Prodigy, Underworld, Orbital, Portishead, Nine Inch Nails etc.
Some of those acts still, and always will inspire us. We’ve just seen Underworld perform last week which was amazing and Nine Inch Nails’s concert must have been one of the highlights from last year.
More modern music : Stephan Bodzin, Moderat, Jon Hopkins, Nathan Fake, EPROM, Weval, Radiohead, Clipping, Run the Jewels, Death Grips, SOHN, Fink, Grimes, The Knife etc.

3- Can you tell us a few words about your upcoming album «The Wrong Room» ? (history, process of production…)

The Wrong Room is our 6th studio album. It took a bit longer than usual. Maybe because these days we have a lot on our plates, between traveling across the world for gigs, running nights in our town, running the label and doing international events.We have help these days, but find we like to keep control over a lot still.
So the album. We always take a lot of time playing around with ideas, creating projects that are half-finished at most. In this stage you can have a lot of fun with new plugins, synths, samples you name it. Of course you learn a lot from working with other people too ! After a period of this, we all come the same conclusion that maybe it’s time to actually think about finishing up some projects and see what’s good and what’s not. In that stage we also start sending previews out to vocalists (we rarely work with them in our studio as they are usually in different countries from where we are at the time) and when we get the mixdowns down we need to think about title, artwork and all that stuff.

4- Nowadays, your label Blackout Music is the reference for Neurofunk, can you tell the story behind the creation and the « explosion » of this label ?

After the success of our last album ‘From the Shadows’ we realized that there was a lot of demand for the sound we create and love, but looking at the scene the sound we represent was really divided. Everybody had their own label on which they’d release, but nobody really had the time to write music and take their label to the next level.So we came to the conclusion there was room for a brand that would join forces, so all the artists involved would benefit from each other and we knew that this was the right time to do it, we just had to come up with a good name.
Fortunately enough the event ‘Blackout’ we started 15 years ago in a club called Tivoli was slowly spreading over Europe, and this gave us the perfect platform for the artists we wanted to get involved with the new label. So the logical step was to combine it all and so Blackout Music was born. Having said that we didn’t imagine that it would ‘grow’ so rapidly. Why it did. I guess it was the right timing in combination with the quality control we have when it comes to releasing music, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s just great to see so many people love what we do and want to be part of this family and so do we and I guess that’s what makes it genuine.

We thank the trio so much for this interview and we will be there on the 1st of april to make a live report at the Born to Rave !